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UNDERSTANDING THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY

Matteo Laruffa, PhD student LUISS Guido Carli University

XXX Annual Conference of the Italian Political Science Association

Milan, 15-17 September 2016

Preliminary draft. Please, do not quote without author’s permission.

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to answer the following research question: how to explain the current crisis of

democracy?

The paper will first present the current state of both democratic and non-democratic regimes in the world. This

will show that even democratization has been one of the main macro-political phenomena of the last century,

this trend has radically changed with new pessimism about democracy and the resurgence of authoritarianism.

Secondly, it will identify the scope of this analysis in western democracies and the relevant literature

concerning the theoretical problem of understanding the crisis of democracy. Hence, it will summarize the

main theoretical approaches and some recent contributions which are particularly relevant in terms of empirical

research, method, and theoretical analysis.

The third part of the paper will explain the crisis of democracy as a lag in the process of adaptation. It is mainly

devoted to the notion of the crisis of democracy and adaptability. It offers three main hypotheses in order to

address the research question of the paper. These hypotheses depict the tensions of the utmost importance

which have impacted democracy in terms of citizens’ disengagement, radicalization of politics, less responsive

policies, and deviation from traditional sources of legitimization.

It will finally discuss why regimes should be adaptable if they want to preserve their identity and how the crisis

of democracy changes not just the models of democracy, but the idea of democracy.

Keywords: crisis of democracy, adaptability, ultimate tensions, western democracies

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Introduction

Political scientists have proposed many different interpretations of the crisis of democracy and offered useful

insights and analytical indication. However, most of the existing theories of crisis of democracy to date give

only a partial point of view on the phenomenon. This raises some fundamental questions: how to explain the

current crisis of democracy? why democracies are in crisis? which are the key causes of this phenomenon?

which is the definition of crisis of democracy? What lessons can be learned from the crisis of democracy?

Following Samuel P. Huntington (1968) in his research on the political order in changing societies, I refer to

the idea of adaptability of both democratic and non-democratic regimes, as their capacity to change in order to

protect their identity. I present this idea, not a fully-fledged theory, which can show us how democracy changes

in a dynamic evolution made by tensions, which reach an ultimate extent and force the regimes to adapt

themselves in order to improve (or at least preserve) their identity.

The current crisis is a time of ultimate tensions for western democracies.

Democratic and Non-Democratic regimes in the world

The aim of the following paragraphs is to describe the recent debate on the global status of democracy.

The most illuminating account of expansion of democracy’s historical trajectory was put forward by

Huntington (1991) in his book “The Third Wave: Democratization in the late Twentieth Century.”

Huntington found that democracy’s advances have occurred primarily in three waves, as periods in

which the number of democratic regimes has risen substantially, with transitions to democracy

considerably outpacing breakdowns of democracy.1

Since 1974, after the end of the regime of the Estado Novo in Portugal, the Third Wave spread

worldwide from Southern Europe to Latin America and then it swept through Asia and moved across

the former Soviet bloc. At the beginning of the Third Wave, there were about 46 democracies in the

world, but soon, as Huntington noted: “democracy seemed to take on the character of an almost

irresistible global tide moving on from one triumph to the next.”2

Huntington never did pinpoint exactly the end of the Third Wave and this matter is still debated

among scholars. He just posed a crucial question about the future: “to what extent would the Third

Wave go beyond the first and the second wave?” and offered some suggestions about the future

developments of democratization, when he writes: “Judging by the record of the past, the two most

decisive factors affecting the future consolidation and expansion of democracy will be economic

development and political leadership”3 and Huntington emblematically added: “Economic

development makes democracy possible; political leadership makes it real.”4

Using Freedom House’s data, if the Third Wave came to an end in the first years of the Nineties, it

would be made by more than sixty cases of transition to democracy.5 Many changes on the global

democracy map happened since the publication of Huntington’s book and the principal sets of macro-

political data show the end of the optimistic long-term scenario for the expansion of democracy to

those areas of the world which have been organized as non-democratic regimes.

Even though different theoretical and methodological approaches have been elaborated in order to

explain democratization, the trajectory of democracy in the opening decade and a half of the twenty-

first century remains a matter of some disputes among political scientists. Diamond and Plattner

1 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late 20th Century, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, p. 24. 2 Ibidem, p. 21. 3 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late 20th Century, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, p. 316. 4 Ivi. 5 Freedom House, Freedom House Annual Reports.

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(2015) recently contrasted different perspectives regarding whether there has simply been democratic

slowdown or downturn. They observed a progressive shift from a sometimes over-optimistic view of

the future, to a more sceptical account of post-Cold War democratic transitions, and to a largely

pessimistic analysis of ongoing events. Many scholars contemplate an era of democratic decline, as

the beginning of a new phase characterized by the absence of democratic progress with the rise of

new global counter-democratic actors as China, Iran and Russia. It is not only in soft-power

competition that the advanced democracies are falling short. Increasingly, they are looking weaker in

terms of hard power as well, shrinking their defence budgets even as authoritarian states rapidly

increase their spending on arms. As Carothers (2015) describes “Democracy’s travails in both the

United States and Europe have greatly damaged the standing of democracy in the eyes of many people

around the world.” Nevertheless, alternative interpretations have been proposed about the real nature

of this phase of the recent evolution of the conditions of democracy in the world.

On the one hand, Diamond (2015) points out that “democracy had a remarkable global run, as the

number of democracies essentially held steady or expanded every year from 1975 until 2007.”6

According to Diamond there has been a democratic recession, with a decline in aggregate Freedom

House scores since 2006 and similar results are reported by other indexes (i.e. the Economist

Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy).

Indeed, Diamond notes that “there has been no net expansion in the number of electoral democracies,

which has oscillated between 114 and 119 (about 60 percent of the world’s states).”7 With reference

to the rate of democratic failure, during the first fifteen years of the new century, democracy collapsed

in 25 countries. What it more relevant is not the number of cases of failed democratization, but how

those regimes in transition toward democracy regressed to something different from pure

authoritarian regimes. As argued in details by Diamond, their transitions have happened “not only

through blatant military or executive coups, but also through subtle and incremental degradations of

democratic rights and procedures.”8 They represent the emerging category known with the expression

competitive authoritarianism, which is an ever higher diversified genus. Levitsky and Way (2010),

who coined the expression competitive authoritarianism, describe it as the category of “regimes that

combine competitive elections with serious violation of democratic procedure – proliferated in the

post–Cold War era.”9 This type of regime combines elements of democracy and autocracy, and

involves significant freedom together with either limited suffrage rights, restrictions on electoral

competition or constrained accountability of elected rulers. The rise of hybrid regimes has forced

observers to go back and re-evaluate the record of democratisation since the Third Wave.

A new transitional path started at the end of the Nineties in Russia and Venezuela, where less electoral

fairness, limited political pluralism, violations of rights and freedoms of opposition undermined

democratic conditions and reconverted entire regimes into systems of personal power under the

ruling-party hegemony.

It was Russia’s failed democratization that led many scholars to change their views about the

prospects for a global democratic revolution. This trend also includes the institutional crisis in Central

African Republic (2001), the suspension of the elected parliament in Madagascar (2009), the military

coup in Mali (2012), the Ukraine crisis (2014), the failure of pro-democracy protests by the Umbrella

Movement in Hong Kong (2014), the impeachment controversy in Brazil (2016), the transition to an

6 Larry Diamond, Facing up the democratic recession, Journal of democracy, 2015, p. 141. 7 Ibidem, p. 142. 8 Ibidem, p. 144. 9 Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, Cambridge University Press,

2010.

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ever more authoritarian regime in Turkey (2015) where Recep Tayyip Erdogan has established a

strong centralized control of the power made by marked intolerance and violent repression of dissent.

Moreover, although encouraging signals come from recent developments in terms of democratization

in the East Asian region, they are still ambiguous for democracy in countries like Myanmar and

clearly negative in countries like Thailand. On the one hand, in Myanmar, where Aung San Suu Kyi’s

National League for Democracy won the general elections on 8 November 2015, the political

transition is still uncertain and in its early stages, because the Tatmadaw, the military elite which took

the control of the country in 1962, has still enough power based on untouchable prerogatives and

political functions granted by the 2008 constitution, to be seen as the only true veto player.10 On the

other hand, the army seized power in Thailand in two military coups in 2006 and 2014. This case of

failed democratization represents an example of East Asian authoritarianism.

This democracy-in-retreat narrative is not limited to Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America,

but it includes also the chain of events happened in the Middle East and North Africa in the last years.

Most of the movements of mass protests of the Arab Spring did not create the conditions for

democratizing. With reference to those recent developments, Diamond notes that: “The Arab Spring

has imploded in almost every country that it touched save Tunisia, leaving in most cases even more

repressive states or, as in the case of Libya, hardly a state at all.”11

These failed attempts of transition to democracy confirm Huntington’s (1991) conviction that the

process of change can be done and achieved its purposes only with actions of pro-democracy elites,

compromises and elections. Indeed, Huntington reminds us that “the electoral dynamic led from

authoritarianism to democracy, the revolutionary dynamic led from one form of authoritarianism to

another.”12 It should be taken seriously Huntington’s (1991) assertion that: “The resort to violence

increased the power of the specialists in violence in both government and the opposition.

Governments created by moderation and compromise ruled by moderation and compromise.

Governments produced by violence ruled by violence.”13

The assessment of the condition of democracy worldwide is still an open question and this new phase

can be explained in different ways. For example, Plattner (2015) claims that the three chief reasons

are: “(1) the growing sense that the advanced democracies are in trouble in terms of their economic

and political performance; (2) the new self-confidence and seeming vitality of some authoritarian

countries; and (3) the shifting geopolitical balance between the democracies and their rivals.”14

Levitsky and Way (2015) do not believe in the narrative of the crisis of democracy above described

and critic what they call the “myth of the Democratic Recession” born from a misunderstanding of

the unusual developments of the 1990s. According to Lewitsky and Way, the negative perception on

democratic conditions of the world is not consistent with the real state of democracy which has

improved since the end of the Cold War. They argue that even the decrease in overall Freedom House

scores up through 2013 has been very slight, and that the indicators produced by other organizations

such as Polity IV, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Bertelsmann index show no decline at all.

This general misinterpretation is rooted in a flawed understanding of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As Lewitsky and Way put it, the current exaggerated pessimism is the result of unrealistic

expectations of the future which went not realized.15

There is an overwhelming consensus among scholars about new conditions of resurgence of many

authoritarian regimes around the world. The leading authoritarian regimes (Chinese partitocracy,

10 Min Zin, Burma Votes for Change: The New Configuration of Power, Journal of Democracy, 2016. 11 Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Democracy in Decline?, JHU Press, 2015, p. 112. 12 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late 20th Century, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, p. 148. 13 Ivi, p. 207. 14 Marc F. Plattner in Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Democracy in decline?, Johns Hopkins University Press and the National

Endowment for Democracy, 2015, p. 7. 15 Steven Lewitsky and Lucan Way, The myth of democratic recession in Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Democracy in decline?,

Johns Hopkins University Press and the National Endowment for Democracy, 2015, p. 59.

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Russian neo-czarism, Arab monarchies or Iranian theocracy) have developed some institutional

innovations and political reforms both in their domestic and foreign policy. In a few words, for the

first time since the end of the Cold War, in some fields (i.e. economic growth) authoritarian regimes

outperform democracies. For example, they seemed more resilient in the last financial crisis. As

captured by Runciman (2013), with reference to the authoritarian regime: “They can take decisive

action without fear of the electoral consequences, allowing them to impose short-term costs for the

sake of long- term benefits. This is the advantage of autocratic systems that Tocqueville identified:

they are better at thinking about the long term in the short term.”16

On one side, their internal reforms are an attempt to avoid and prevent the risks of both endogenous

and exogenous causes of collapse. Their main aim has been to make these institutional and political

systems more adaptable in order to become immune to the classic reasons of their inevitable

breakdown. On the other, they adopted a new international strategy which enlarges their influence

worldwide in order to compete with democracies, shape new organizations, write rules aimed at

reforming the international order, project their powers beyond their borders, and finally contain

possible future waves of democratization by proposing authoritarianism as alternative to the idea of

democracy. China is the best example of this new season for authoritarian regimes. Firstly, the

macroeconomic consequences of the global financial crises affected asymmetrically democracies and

autocracies, with stronger impact on the former than the latter. In this dynamic, China has grown as

a leading power which proposes its own model and strategy of economic integration/involvement to

the world. It is the Beijing Consensus theorized by Cooper Ramo (2004) as “a fusion of Chinese

thinking with lessons learned from the failure of globalization culture in other places.”17 Secondly,

following the model of analysis of Hellman (1998) on post-communist transitions in terms of

economic reforms18 and extending this model to the Chinese case, it is clear that China has been

particularly capable to take advantage from the absence of a free debate on the reforms, which means

governing without the political short-term transitional costs. According to Runciman (2013): “The

Chinese have a range of short-term advantages. Unlike past communist regimes, they are not

constrained by ideology. Unlike democracies, they are not constrained by constitutional checks and

balances. They can enforce technocratic solutions to economic problems more easily than we can.”19

Thirdly, China has also opened the way to new strategies for controlling content on internet. King,

Pan, Roberts (2013) find that the Chinese authorities did not to suppress criticism of the state or the

Communist Party, but the purpose of the censorship program is to reduce the probability of collective

action by clipping social ties whenever any collective movements are in evidence or expected.20

Finally, as Huntington (1968) explained in his theory of institutionalization, one of the most important

feature for the survival of a political system or organization is its adaptability. One of the measures

identified by Huntington in order to conceptualize the level of institutionalization is the generational

age of the political system.21 In this perspective, the Chinese model of governance has revealed itself

to be one of the most adaptable in what has been usually a risky aspect for many non-democratic

regimes: the peaceful succession and replacement of one set of leaders by another one.

16 David Runciman, The Confidence trap a history of democracy in crisis from World War I to the present, Princeton University Press,

2013, p. 309. 17 Ramo Joshua Cooper, The Beijing Consensus, The Foreign Policy Centre, 2004, p. 5. 18 Joel S. Hellman, Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions, 1998. 19 David Runciman, The Confidence trap a history of democracy in crisis from World War I to the present, Princeton University Press,

2013, p. 318. 20 Gary King, Jennifer Pan, Margaret E. Roberts, How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective

Expression, American Political Science Review, 2013. 21 Huntington Samuel, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968, pp. 13-14.

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From this brief overview on the current status of democracy in the world, it follows that both the good

functioning of democracy in many consolidated regimes and the gradual transition of non-democratic

regimes toward democracy seem ever more difficult.

In terms of our research interests, it might be useful to perfect the scope of this analysis by proceeding

to a differentiation between two main phenomena the current debate on the status of democracy is

focused on. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that although these phenomena are clearly intertwined

in facts, they are not clearly delimited in theories. It seems that there are many overlaps in the recent

literature between cases of crisis which occur in the transition to democracy and those ones which

occurs in the function of democracy. Actually, they are two distinct phenomena and a demarcation

between them is the first step in order to identify the subject matter of this study. Following

Schmitter’s (1995) distinction between transition and consolidation,22 I endeavour to separate the

analysis of crisis of democratization, namely the crisis in regimes in transition toward democracy,

which can undermine, limit or interrupt the transition of regime, from the analysis of crisis of

democracy, as the crisis in stable democracies, which can impact on the function and organization of

regime. Therefore, this analysis does not consider the conditions for democracy to enlarge where it

does not exist, rather than those ones for democracy to work where it already exists. With knowledge

on these differences, it should be fairly easy to identify the scope of this analysis on the crisis of

democracy in the crisis of western democracies.

The privileged context of this paper is the crisis of democracy in the advanced industrial societies.

Multiple and more frequent crises have been taking place in many consolidated democratic regimes

where governments fail to solve problems, politics takes extremist directions and entire institutional

systems perform poorly and face a loss of legitimacy because of feelings of mistrust that have

gradually broadened to include evaluations of political institutions. In a few words, the performances

of democracy have been disappointing, and these conditions of dissatisfaction and distress risk to

undermine the legitimacy of institutions in many consolidated democracies. In Dalton’s (2004)

assessment of most empirical measures of democracy in use: “the cross-national breadth of this

pattern suggests it is a general feature of contemporary politics in advanced industrial democracies,

not the specific experience of only a few nations.”23 Even if with many differences between countries,

this phenomenon is mainly related to the European states and the US.

Accordingly, the next pages will be related to the theoretical approaches for the study of consolidated

democratic regimes, and more in particular of the Western democracies. The main aim of the next

part of the paper is to turn to the most prominent theoretical approaches in order to understand the

mechanisms responsible for democratic crises. Understanding the crisis of democracy and investigate

on it causes, features and effects will be useful not only as a theoretical exercise, but also in order to

consider measures to help many democracies to flourish again.

The crisis of democracy in the advanced industrial societies

Different theoretical approaches

The larger goal of this section is to clarify and place in perspective the diverse theories of crisis of

democracy that have emerged in these studies. Before assessing the main theoretical approaches,

some theoretical clarifications are needed. First of all, as suggested by Sartoris’s (1970) strategy for

22 Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitology: The Science or the Art of Democratization?, in Joseph Tulchin with Bernice Romero (eds.),

The Consolidation of Democracy in Latin America, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Schock, Kurt, 2005, pp. 11-41. 23 Russell J. Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices, The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial

Democracies, Oxford University Press Inc., 2004, p. 39.

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avoiding conceptual stretching,24 an explanatory theory of the crisis of democracy should be

sufficiently general to encompass the regularities observed across both time and space but at the same

time enough parsimonious in order to offer tools for precising the definition and hence, distinguishing

the crisis of democracy, from other crises (for example an economic crisis) that can however hit a

democratic regime. It means to separate the crises of regime from all the cases of regime in crisis

without ignoring that the former can be caused by the latter. For example, during the economic crisis

started in 2008, western democracies were in crisis. The global financial crisis has installed doubts in

peoples’ confidence about the democratic systems and their performances. On the one hand, often the

research literature links the decline in support to economic decline or an economic crisis, and some

authors have analyzed the current crisis of democracy as engendered by the global financial crisis.

On the other hand, many different studies consider the relations democracy-crises. Merkel (2014)

mentions the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Tocqueville, Marx and Weber, and reminds us that

“political theory has posited from the outset that democracy is inconceivable without crisis.”25 With

reference to this point, Urbinati (2016) stresses that “constitutions and procedures were constructed

in view of allowing a crisis of consent (hence the break of unanimity and the adoption of the rule of

majority) without shattering the system and without curtailing freedom of opinion and criticism

either.”26

For the sake of brevity, I cannot do justice to all the theoretical nuances and explanations, yet the

summary identifies certain definitional and conceptual benchmarks that have played a crucial role in

orienting these studies. The literature on the crisis of democracy offers at least three main theoretical

approaches and explanations that scholars have employed until today.

The first school of thought emphasizes the problems of governability and poor institutional

performances as possible causes of the crisis of democracy. Laski’s (1933) research is one of the first

works on the crisis of democracy. He tried to study in depth democracy’s ability to endure especially

when faced by non-democratic challenges. Actually, the first comprehensive analysis on the issue is

the work by Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki (1975), entitled “The crisis of democracy: report on

the governability of democracies to the Trilateral Commission.” They studied the condition of

democracy in the US, Europe and Japan. They articulated a deepen description of how disappointing

policy outcomes of governments could cause risks of disengagement from politics and

disenchantment with the democratic process. Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki focused their

attention on the fact that during the Seventies, the consolidated democracies missed adequate

authority, resources and powers to deal with the problems of their societies. In order to understand

the reasons of that crisis, Huntington further developed the same argument that he had already

proposed in 1968 in the core assumption that “the most important political distinction among

countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.”27 According to

Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki, democratic governments could face a crisis of governability

which could have been overloaded by too many responsibilities and expectations of citizens in a

period of international economic recession. Twenty-five years later, Pharr and Putnam (2000) updated

that analysis by arguing that the problem of weakened performances of democratic regimes is mainly

caused by governments’ diminished capacity to act in an interdependent world. In the detailed

research made by the two authors, the current crisis does not depend only on the unsatisfactory

functioning of democracies and the new growing public expectations, but also on the widespread use

24 Giovanni Sartori, Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics, The American Political Science Review 64, no. 4, 1970. 25 Wolfgang Merkel, Is There a Crisis of Democracy?, Democratic Theory Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2014, p. 11. 26 Nadia Urbinati, Reflections on the meaning of the crisis of democracy, in Mark Chou, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Democratic Theory,

Volume 3, 2016, p. 6. 27 Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968, p. 1.

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of information which has altered the criteria by which people judge their governments. Indeed, their

most important theoretical contribution is to pinpoint the increasing limits to national governments’

autonomous powers to act in an ever more integrated international order. Following these premises,

Fukuyama’s (2015) intervention in the ongoing debate relies on the conviction that “the legitimacy

of many democracies around the world depends less on the deepening of their democratic institutions

than on their ability to provide high-quality governance.”28

What distinguishes these theories is that they locate the most significant triggers of the crisis of

democracy in the institutional capacity to act and in their outcomes. These authors are representative

of a theoretical approach which reflects a top-down perspective on the phenomenon of the crisis of

democracy. They evaluate the effectiveness of institutions and governments, and focus the research

on the questions: How effective are institutions? Do they perform well? Is effective governability

possible for democracies? How promptly do institutions act?

The second school of thought emphasizes the dissatisfaction with democratic institutions and the

decrease in political support. Although, Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki’s contribution, as well as

that one by Pharr and Putnam, also consider the problem of the disappointment with democracy, other

works based on opinion research have directly extended this theoretical argument in order to explain

the crisis of democracy from another perspective: that of citizens’ perceptions. As Dalton (2000)

pertinently writes: “perceptions are reality when explaining individual citizen behaviour.”29 The

logics of the argument is grounded in many contributions and ideas from the research on political

support. For example, it is based on the seminal work by Almond and Verba (1963) about individuals’

attitudes towards the political system, as composed of cognitive, affective and evaluative orientations,

which are respectively: the knowledge of the system, feelings towards it, and judgment of it.30

Another important turning point has been that one of the study of the effect of education and

habituation to democratic practices on people’s attitude towards politics. Indeed, consolidated

democracies’ citizens have a higher level of habituation to critical thinking and higher expectations

on the democratic process. This reflection has been crucial in order to develop a new field of study

on political stability of regimes, trust in institutions and support to politics. Citrin (1974) argued that

the past naive idealism about institutions’ capacity was gradually disappearing and people simply

became more realistic about politics. From a research on the condition of support to government in

the US, Citrin stressed that the American society was developing a democratic political culture and

he recalled John Stuart Mill’s belief, when he argued that “a democratic political culture is

characterized by a vigilant skepticism (or realist cynicism) rather than an unquestioning faith in the

motives and abilities of political authorities.”31 Fuchs and Klingemann (1995) made the first broad

compilation of empirical data on citizen orientations towards governments and their data claimed that

the political attitudes of contemporary publics had fundamentally changed. They commented those

findings by clarifying that the fundamental change which took place in the relationship between

citizens and the state provoked a challenge to representative democracy.32 In a few words, these

researches opened the way to the studies on the rise of what Norris (1999) called “critical citizens”33

28 Fukuyama Francis, Why is democracy performing so poorly? in Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Democracy in decline?, Johns

Hopkins University Press and the National Endowment for Democracy, 2015, p. 16. 29 Russell J. Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices, The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial

Democracies, Oxford University Press Inc., 2004, p. 116. 30 Gabriel Abraham Almond and Sidney Verba. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes in Five Western Democracies, Princeton

University Press, 1963, p. 15. 31 Jack Citrin, Comment: The political relevance of trust in government, American Political Science, 1974, p. 988. 32 Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Dieter Fuchs, Citizens and the State, OUP/European Science Foundation, 1995, p. 429. 33 Pippa Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Governance, Oxford University Press, 1999.

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or in the words used by Klingemann (1999) “dissatisfied democrats.”34 According to Klingemann,

this attitude translates a general dissatisfaction with political institutions, even if people are still

supportive of democratic principles. He describes it as “a common attitudinal pattern in advanced

industrial democracies.”35

In other words, this second group of researches reflects a bottom-up perspective on the crisis of

democracy. They are more focused on the representation gap or discrepancy, as the difference

between citizens’ preferences and governments policy. That is to say, what Norris (2011) studies in

terms of a structural trust gap caused by the effect of the increased expectations of citizens and the

lack of capacity of democratic governments, or more simply, what forty years before Pye (1971)

called the “gap between wish and performance.”36 This sort of theories is intended to offer a

descriptive point of view on crisis of democracy that is based on an empirical account of citizens’

behavior and expectations. They answer to the questions: Are citizens satisfied by their democracy,

governments, parties? How do citizens change their attitudes towards politics, institutions and

democratic principles?

However, both these approaches still leave a number of important questions to address. These

researches often outline segmented analyses which tend to underestimate the complexity of the

changing conditions of many democracies offering a partial explanation of the phenomenon: the first

approach is made by theories on qualities of government and the second is made by theories on

qualities of participation. It might be better to use the term qualities rather than quality because in

both cases there is a description of at least more than one aspects of every causal principle. For

example, in the case of participation, these researches describe at least level, type and direction of

participation (i.e. if it has changed in nature rather than declined in its level with increasing abstention

rate, if it has changed direction by supporting or opposing targets of political expression, etc). Finally,

they do not contemplate the evolution of the role of some democratic institutions, the involvement of

non-political actors in the policy-making processes, the emergence of new issues in the political

debates, etc. For example, some authors explain the current status of the advanced democracy with

relevant alternative aspects related to long-term changes in the social and political conditions of

advanced industrial societies. According to Alesina, Spolaore and Wacziarg (2000), the root cause of

the public’s disenchantment with politics are in the increasing economic changes caused by the global

economic interdependence.37 While, as Inglehart (1990) claims modernization creates new public

values and skepticism towards politics.38 His research shows how modernization has changed

citizens’ interests because of the growing attention towards new postmaterial values and the lag of

governments’ responses about these new issues caused new political attitudes against the incumbents

and mainstream political movement, in support of alternative political parties. In 2000, Dalton tested

this hypothesis and his evidences suggest that: “the process of social modernization is admittedly

only a partial explanation, accounting for perhaps 20–30 per cent of the total decline.”39

Using Urbinati’s point of view on this issue, they reflect the two broad conceptions of politics that

the polysemy of crisis involves. On the one hand, one technical or problem-solving which refers to

an objective and detectable condition of instability that asks for a functional resolving by authority.

On the other hand, one rhetorical or discursive which is expression of subjective evaluation by

34 Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Mapping Political Support in the 1990s: A Global Analysis, in Pippa Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens: Global

Support for Democratic Governance, Oxford University Press, 1999. 35 Ibidem. 36 Lucian W. Pye Identity and the Political Culture, in Leonard Binder, Joseph La Palombara, Crises and Sequences in Political

Development, Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 110. 37 Alberto Alesina, Enrico Spolaore, and Romain Wacziarg, Economic Integration and Political Disintegration, American Economic

Review, 2000. 38 Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, Princeton University Press, 1990. 39 Russell J. Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices, The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial

Democracies Oxford University Press Inc., 2004 p. 96.

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citizens.40 In a few words, these two groups of scholars consider the same problem, from two

different, but at the same time interrelated and complementary points of view. Both the sets of factors

considered by them are undoubtedly of crucial importance.

The latest approach is more theoretical then the previous ones and it has had an enormous impact,

both within and outside the scholarly community because it deals with this issue in terms of crisis of

the idea of democracy. Habermas’ (1973) theory is based on the concept of legitimation crisis and it

is contextualized in the wider perspective of the study of the political system shifts to the economic

and the socio-cultural one during the capitalist development. Habermas described how many different

crises shape “an objective force that deprives a subject of some part of his normal sovereignty.”41

This process is seen as made by a chain of crises in a tendency in a tendency that involves modern

capitalist states and creates a legitimation deficit. With reference to the political system, according to

Habermas we can distinguish output crises from input ones. On the one hand, the former engender a

rationality crisis. On the other hand, the latter engender a legitimation crisis, which is an identity crisis

because it involves the essential structures of the social system.42

The most recent contributions that follow the theoretical model of explanation heralded by Habermas,

but not in the same way he originally conceived it nor with those conclusions, are Crouch (2004),

Tilly (2007) and Rosanvallon (2008). Their contributions to this research would be analyzed in more

details because of the conceptual innovations that their theories offer to this field of studies.

Crouch (2004) goes beyond the narrow conceptualization of the crisis of democracy. He stresses that

there is a drift towards post-democracy and identifies some broader mechanisms of transformation

which creates new social and institutional conditions that he defines “post-democracy or a post-

democratic façade.”43 Formal processes without democratic substance because of globalization,

deregulation, loss of collective capacity. As Crouch argues, post-democratic societies continue to

have and to use all the institutions of democracy, but they are gradually becoming not more than

formal praxes which does not produce any relevant outcomes, because decision-making procedures

are in the hands of small circles of a politico-economic elite.44 He affirms that “politics and

government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner

characteristic of pre-democratic times.”45 The first effect of this transition from democracy to post-

democracy will be the paralysis of individual political capacity of citizens: “growing incapacity of

modern citizens to work out what their interests are.”46

Tilly’s (2007) research proceeds essentially from the conviction that “democracy is a good in itself,

since to some degree it gives a regime’s population collective power to determine its own fate.”47 He

has further developed the theory in order to “explain variation and change in the extent to which the

state behaves according to its citizens’ expressed demands.”48 His main innovation is related to the

new conception of democratization and that one of de-democratization. A crucial and intriguing part

of his theory is to conceive democratization as a two-way street. Therefore, democratization is seen

as a continuous process that is not limited to the transition of regime and in this view Tilly identifies

a reverse process which makes democratic regimes less democratic. It is what he calls de-

democratization. Tilly has the ambitious aim of developing a new paradigm of political transitions

based on broad mechanisms of institutional changes which are substantially: an increase in the

40 Nadia Urbinati, Reflections on the meaning of the crisis of democracy, in Mark Chou, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Democratic Theory,

Volume 3, 2016, p. 6. 41 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Polity Press, 1973, p. 1. 42 Ivi, p. 3. 43 Colin Crouch, Post-democracy (Themes for the 21st Century Series), Wiley, 2004, p. 6. 44 Ivi, p. 22. 45 Ivi, p. 6. 46 Ivi, p. 28. 47 Charles Tilly, Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.6. 48 Ivi, p. 59.

11

breadth and equality of participation, a reduction in arbitrary power, and an increase in protected

consultation. Indeed, Tilly argues that a:

“A regime is democratic to the degree that political relations between the state and its citizens feature

broad, equal, protected, mutually binding consultation. Democratization then means net movement

toward broader, more equal, more protected, and more mutually binding consultation and de-

democratization means net movement toward narrower, more unequal, less protected, and less

mutually binding consultation.”49

Rosanvallon’s (2008) account of this issue is focused on two main aspects, which are the functions

and dysfunctions of electoral representative institutions, and the organization of distrust.50 He

articulates a theoretical framework, which has sought to logically explain how a steady erosion of

confidence in representative institutions would produce what he calls “counter-democracy.”51

According to Rosanvallon, in electoral-representative democracy, citizens express a democratic

distrust in three counterpowers: powers of oversight, forms of prevention, and testing of judgments.

They broadly are the main pillars of what he calls counter-democracy: “By “counter-democracy” I

mean not the opposite of democracy but rather a form of democracy that reinforces the usual electoral

democracy as a kind of buttress, a democracy of indirect powers disseminated throughout society–in

other words, a durable democracy of distrust, which complements the episodic democracy of the

usual electoral representative system.”52

In other words, democracy and counter-democracy coexist today in our societies, and as Rosanvallon

claims, in many cases counter-democracy emerges because the distance between civil society and

institutions increases, when a “democracy of rejection” subverts a “democracy of proposition,” new

noninstitutionalized actors develop a political ability to issue a veto, and when “democracy of

accusation” subvert the “democracy of confrontation,” namely with the advent of the people as judge

judicial processes can subvert ballot boxes.53 With reference to the last point, Rosanvallon reminds

us that: “Over the past twenty years, it has become commonplace to remark on the increasing

prominence of judges in the political order.”54 These processes have allowed the development of ever

stronger forms of depoliticization or unpolitical counter-democracy. He asserts that “counter-

democracy has its dark side: the unpolitical. This depoliticization has given rise to a vague but

persistent feeling of malaise, which paradoxically has grown even as civil society has become more

active, better informed, and more capable of intervening in political decisions than ever before.”55

One of the most relevant symptoms of the unpolitical is the rise of populist movements. In

Rosanvallon’s analysis: “Populism claims to resolve the problem of representation by conjuring up

an image of a unified, homogeneous people. It radically rejects whatever it assumes to be inimical to

such unity and homogeneity: foreigners, enemies, oligarchy, elites. With ever more vehement attacks

it seeks to drive a wedge between the people and its supposed enemies. Populists denounce

“otherness” in moral terms (by vilifying the “corrupt” and “rotten”), in social terms (by condemning

“elites”), and in ethnic terms (by attacking “foreigners,” “immigrants,” “minorities,” etc.).”56

The first theoretical framework has primarily sought to explain the crisis of democracy in terms of

government capacity. The second one offers an interpretation of the crisis of democracy as a

participation crisis or a decline of confidence. While these approaches concern the so-called

circumstantial matters, namely those ones which represent specific features varying in time and space,

the third one concerns democracy as an idea and the fundamentals of the democratic model. The third

49 Ibidem. 50 Rosanvallon Pierre, Counter-Democracy Politics in an Age of Distrust, Cambridge University Press 2008, pp. 15-17. 51 Ibidem. 52 Ibidem. 53 Ibidem. 54 Ibidem. 55 Ivi, p. 306. 56 Ivi, p. 266.

12

approach does not properly address the issue as focused on circumstantial factors but on the problems

created by multiple environmental changes that can be both endogenous and exogenous to specific

democratic systems and occur in the context where they work. Each of these distinctive reflections

on the crisis of democracy directs our attention to important theoretical insights about the causal

mechanisms, both endogenous and exogenous to western democracies’ structures, that can engender

a crisis of democracy.

Relevant contributions of empirical research, method and concepts

Some scholars have recently furthered a unified approach incorporating existing theoretical

components from all those ones previously mentioned and some new general assumptions related to

how government’s capacity, citizens’ participation and models of democracy and its own idea have

changed in the last decade. Among them, there are by Dalton (2000, 2007), Merkel (2014) and

Urbinati (2014, 2016). Maybe more than any other, their contributions are useful to understand the

current crisis of democracy because they offer respectively an empirical research, a complete method

of description and a deep theoretical analysis.

Dalton derives empirically testable hypotheses and outlines an empirical analysis of the crisis of

democracy based on two assumptions. If there is a crisis of democracy:

1) the dissatisfaction must have been generalized to the political regime and its principles.

2) it is a crisis in terms of how democracy works rather than of how democracy is organized.57

Dalton (2000, 2007) poses the question “has a malaise finally touched the democratic spirit?” and

notes a decreasing trust in political institutions and supposes that the dissatisfaction is the effect of

the decline of democracies’ responsiveness in terms of “the capacity of political actors to act

according to the interests and desires of citizens.”58 Therefore, he does not consider just the

government capacity in terms of effectiveness of policies, rather than the consistency of these policies

with citizens’ priorities. In a few words, Dalton explains that institutions and politics promote

interests that are different from the citizens’ ones. For example, in the case of the US, Americans’

dissatisfaction with government goes beyond the incumbents in office and hits the institutions

themselves.59 Based on long-term cross-national data on trust in political institutions, politicians and

parties Dalton deems “there is a contemporary malaise in the political spirit involving the three key

elements of representative democracy (what I will refer to as the three Ps): politicians, political

parties, and parliament.”60

Departing from this depiction of the current state of affairs, Dalton tested alternative theories with

empirical data and shows that “there is clear evidence of a general erosion in support for politicians

and government in most advanced industrial democracies. This downward spiral is replicated in

almost every other case, the major variation being in the timing and pace of decline. This is striking.

Regardless of recent trends in the economy, in large and small nations, in presidential and

parliamentary systems, in countries with few parties and many, in federal systems and unitary states,

the direction of change is the same.”61

57 Russell J. Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices, The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial

Democracies Oxford University Press Inc., 2004 p. 41. 58 Ivi, p. 22. 59 Ivi, p. 35. 60 Ivi. p. 36. 61 Ivi, p. 30.

13

According to Dalton, some hypotheses might explain the crisis of democracy because they can

influence the political support, offer an explanation to the growing distrust and describe how

systematic forces change the relationship between citizens and the state in advanced industrial

democracies.62 Some of them are following summarized:

a) economic performance;

b) policy performance;

c) ideology and policy polarization;

d) changing values;

e) social capital;

f) media effects.

He identifies correlates of support rather than predictors, because of limits to explore causal

relationships related to cross-sectional data.63 If one looks closely at Dalton’s research about the

economic hypothesis, it is clear that it must be cast in doubt, at least about the later twentieth century,

because “economic performance, whether measured in objective or subjective terms, does not appear

to be a significant contributor to the long-term decline in political support.”64 The empirical research

made by Dalton suggests that “there is unlikely to be a single explanation for the declines in political

trust. (…) Thus, declines in political trust may reflect a convergence of causes rather than a single

explanation. Recognition of these multiple influences may be a first step in understanding why

political support is changing among contemporary publics.”65

Merkel (2013, 2014) elaborates on the question “Is democracy in crisis?” and bases his comparative

analysis based on different definitions of democratic theories. He proceeds from the conviction that

“a systematic weakness of all crisis theories is that the neither define their concepts of democracy nor

of crisis. In contrast to them I argue that it depends very much on the concepts of the two phenomena

whether one can speak of a crisis of democracy or not.”66 Indeed, he distinguishes between

minimalist, medium (proceduralist) and maximalist model, and explains why the minimalist concept

is of little use for the crisis analysis of consolidated democracies. Hence, Merkel proposes a middle-

range definition based on five intertwined partial regimes which create the conditions of what he

calls: embedded (constitutional) democracy. These regimes are: “democratic election (A), political

participation rights (B), civil rights (C), horizontal accountability (D), effective power to govern

(E).”67

According to Merkel, the crisis of democracy is often characterized by the fact that parliaments are

weaker with ever less power, while executives are stronger with more power. Hence, the balance of

power between the executive and legislative is radically changed. This is just one aspect related to

the current conditions of democracy.

Urbinati’s (2014, 2016) analysis is particularly important and useful because it offers both one of the

most updated description of the current crisis of democracy, provides a thorough theoretical study

and adds important considerations to this debate. In recent years, many scholars have pointed to the

conditions of crisis. Indeed, recent academic writings have produced different descriptions of the

crisis. Although many factors may shape the crisis, some of them are ones that often escapes notice.

Urbinati elaborates her analysis including also some of the aspects that have been underestimated in

many recent researches. For example, Urbinati speaks of the growing power of non-political actors,

the importance of markets and the technocratic executives that substituted elected ones in some

62 Ivi, p. 4. 63 Ivi, p. 62. 64 Ivi, p. 127. 65 Ivi, p. 78. 66 Wolfgang Merkel, Is There a Crisis of Democracy?, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2013, p. 10. 67 Wolfgang Merkel, Is There a Crisis of Democracy?, Democratic Theory Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2014, p. 14.

14

European member states as “indicative of the pervasive belief that democratically elected institutions

are incapable of achieving, or too slow in making, rational policy decisions in the domain of finance

and the economy.”68 Urbinati focuses her contribution on the European Union and she defines it as a

“non-democratic Europe, whose decisions heavily reflect a disproportionate power of one of its

member-states and the banks, add to the mounting feelings of political mistrust.”69

As Urbinati emphasizes, during the last years, consolidated democracies did not provide effective

solutions to the economic crisis. At the same time, democracies have shown a decline of citizens’

confidence in their elected leaders and in the effectiveness of democratic institutions with the rise of

challenger parties, nationalist rhetoric and populist movements.70 As already mentioned in the first

paper of this paper, Urbinati suggests that the crisis of democracy should have this possible meaning:

“a radical break (either/or situations like war, dictatorial break, and revolution); b) a process of

political and juridical judgments that partakes of the system of decision-making in a constitutional

government and is engrained in political liberty; and c) a teleological judgment guided toward an end

that it already presumed or a new epoch and a new order or a catastrophic fatal trend.”71 From this

polysemy she derives two notions of crisis of democracy:

“in one sense, crisis is endogenous to this system since it denotes politics in its own right as an art by

means of which free citizens judge on their deeds, make judgments in and for the public, propose

their critical opinions, and devise decisions according to consented procedures; and in another sense,

crisis denotes a radical break or a situation of exceptionality and/or emergency that can take on

catastrophic characteristics (something that a constitutional democracy is not supposed to face).”72

Her most important insight is in terms of diagnosis of the crisis: “what we witness is the crisis of

parliamentary democracy (that is to say of the power of suffrage) and the expansion of the executive

power (or the contraction of lawmaking) and consequently a transformation of the function,

implementation, and meaning of representation.”73 With reference to the sphere of consent, Urbinati

concludes that “crisis pertains to the form of citizenship participation itself thus as it becomes less

propositional and vocal and more reactive and visual.”74 Indeed, she considers also a problem of

communication and distance between what she calls “institutional democracy” and “extrainstitutional

democracy.”75 Hence, following this argument, Urbinati proposes that “clearly, the issue at stake here

is representative democracy, or a diarchic political order that contemplates two sources of authority:

that of procedures (the constitutionalized decision making system) and that of opinion (the broad

domain of the public sphere within which people freely form and express and change their political

judgment). Crisis would in this case denote a problem of communication between these two levels.”76

Lastly, Urbinati stresses: “Modern democracy’s procedures and constitutions wanted to be guidelines

for governing the crisis, which they assumed were congenital to democracy, not accidental.”77

Therefore, the crisis of democracy might be seen also as the lack of capacity of democracies to govern

the crises and be paradoxically governed by the crises.

68 Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured Opinion, Truth, and the People, Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 83. 69 Nadia Urbinati, Reflections on the meaning of the crisis of democracy, in Mark Chou, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Democratic Theory,

Volume 3, 2016, pp. 1-2. 70 Ibidem. 71 Ivi, p. 4. 72 Ibidem. 73 Ibidem. 74 Ivi, p. 5. 75 Ivi, p. 11. 76 Ibidem. 77 Nadia Urbinati, Reflections on the meaning of the crisis of democracy, in Mark Chou, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Democratic Theory,

Volume 3, 2016, p. 6.

15

It should be acknowledged that these contributions this field of inquiry, clearly outline and define the

features and the scope of this research.

Western democracies lag behind in the process of adaptation

At this time, I have thus sketched three broad interpretations of the theories of crisis of democracy as

reference points. In my view, all the above mentioned approaches to the crisis of democracy contain

a grain of truth as aimed at explaining many aspects of this phenomenon and at the same time, they

are heuristically important because of the contribution given to the problem of understanding the

crisis of democracy. However, departing from this depiction of what in Urbinati’s words is “the new

wave of discourse on the crisis,”78 I would argue that the main issue of this studies, namely the crisis

of democracy, is just a part of a wider phenomenon, that one of the process of adaptation of all

political regimes, both democratic and non-democratic ones. More in details, what we call crisis of

democracy, is a phase of ultimate tensions on western democracies which show a lag in their process

of adaptation.

From this reflection, it follows that:

- vast enduring processes gradually develop new environmental challenges and stresses which

reshape the contexts where political regimes (both democratic and not-democratic) work and cause

growing unexpected tensions on them or divides within them. Accordingly, these growing tensions

and divides can be both exogenous and endogenous, and they differ from specific events, episodic

aspects or circumstantial factors in short periods of time which can be however critical;

- with reference to democracy, when a democratic system is not able to withstand the status quo of

tensions created by the new context where it works, these tensions became worse and grew ever more

until an ultimate extent. Beyond it, the initial condition of that given democratic system changes.

Adaptation requires institutional changes of procedures and organizations. In other words, when

tensions reach an ultimate extent, the change would inevitably take place. Hence, regimes are forced

to adapt themselves in order to protect the existing democratic values and develop new ones. While,

without an adaptation, these tensions and divides create social, political and economic inconsistencies

or contradictions that seem unbearable and undermine democratic values, which eventually can cause

a reverse transition of regime;

- models of democracy come in succession as forms of organization of societies, in which the crises

are periods preceding a passage from a model of democracy to another, namely to a democracy which

is more adapt and adaptable to preserve its identity in new environmental conditions.

In this wider theoretical perspective, it is possible to look at the history of democracy in a new light,

as ever less focused on a rigid idea of what we consider democracy and ever more based on a dynamic

conception which contemplates how models of democracy change successively over time, and

develop as functionally differentiated expressive models which can adapt themselves to special social

values and environmental conditions of a given society. In this more comprehensive vision of the

evolution of democracy, democratic systems have been able to improve (or at least preserve) their

democratic identity because of their adaptability in crises. Accordingly, the crisis of democracy is a

phase which implies two conditions: (i) growing tensions on democracies which reach moments of

ultimate extent; (ii) growing paralysis of democracies as effects of a lag in the process of adaptation,

which keeps their existing institutions and patterns operating unaltered despite the unavoidable need

of an adaptation to the new contextual conditions. This study explains that democracy overcomes the

78 Ivi, p. 3.

16

crises if it proceeds in a process of adaptation. Democracies can flourish if their democracy is seen

as a continuous never ending process of perfection of their models, which makes them fit for the

environmental conditions of society.

This definition of crisis of democracy differs from the other proposed by the above mentioned authors

because it implies that the condition of crisis is different from that of crisis of trust or lack of popular

support, or from poor government’s performances. The phenomenon of the crisis is described in terms

of long-term tensions and paralysis caused by a lag in the process of adaptation. This is different from

what Urbinati (2016) suggests in her recent contribution on the issue. According to Urbinati, it is

possible to reconstruct its meaning and obtaining some reference points. Among the meanings of the

word crisis there are those ones of: turning point, interrupting regularity, phase of changes and

breaking. Urbinati recovers the idea of crisis derived from the Greek and used by Aristotle as

“judgment” and “trial” of crucial importance.79 She grounds her analysis on these two meanings

which can be considered significant for the aim of this research because “directly referable to politics

(and democracy).”80

In terms of our research interests, the adaptability of regimes is the linkage-variable that might

connect democracies with their context, and explain how democracies respond or endure to changes

in the context where they exist and why do some democracies succeed better than others. The strong,

wide and long-term processes of contextual change produce some tensions and divides which create

recurrent crises of democracy and subsequent passages from one model to another. I use the words

“tension” in order to define the indirect effects of the contextual change, which gradually push models

of democracy over the edge, until these models change and become more adapted to the current

context and adaptable to future ones. According to Hungtington (1968): “Adaptability is an acquired

organizational characteristic. It is in rough sense, a function of environmental challenge and age. The

more challenges that have arisen in its environment and the grater its age, the more adaptable it is.”81

Even if Huntington described the idea of adaptability, he did not translate it into a comprehensive

theory. Actually, he considered it not more than a conceptual attribute of his institutionalization

theory. It might be worthy to update and further develop this theory. For example, it should be

corrected when Huntington identifies the age of the regime as one of the factors which makes more

adaptable. Indeed, regimes do not develop just their own solutions to every challenges, but their

leaders can learn from the experiences of other regimes. Therefore, under the current conditions, even

a young regime which has not yet achieved relevant phases of adaptation, can adapt itself and

overcome that crisis and the next ones by treasuring of the experiences of other regimes, their failures

and successes, their mistakes and solutions.

Merkel (2013) and Runciman (2013) are two authors who recently mention the adaptation and

adaptability of democracy with reference to crisis of democracy. Actually, Merkel proposes a

different theoretical explanation of the crisis, which is based on his idea of embedded democracy.

While Runciman studies seven crucial international crisis (not crises of democracy) since 1918, which

have influenced the transition to democratic rule and the conditions for stable modern democracies.

For example, with reference to democratic systems, as Runciman (2013) clarifies: “When things get

really bad, we will adapt. Until they get really bad, we need not adapt, because democracies are

ultimately adaptable.”82

Following this approach means to read again the evolution of democracy in terms of its adaptability.

For example, the American democracy changed many times since its foundation and every phase of

79 Nadia Urbinati, Reflections on the meaning of the crisis of democracy, in Mark Chou, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Democratic Theory,

Volume 3, 2016, pp. 9-10. 80 Ibidem. 81 Huntington Samuel, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968, p. 13. 82 David Runciman, The Confidence trap a history of democracy in crisis from World War I to the present, Princeton University

Press, 2013, p. 285.

17

adaptation has been the outcome of a long-term process of gradual development of new

environmental challenges which created growing tensions and they forced its institutions to adapt in

order to preserve and improve their democratic identity.

Among the tensions and key moments of adaptation of the American democracy there are:

- the Jacksonian democracy: the abolition of property requirements or substantial tax requirements

for the franchise. The suffrage issue was only one of a number of important issues that divided the

population. As Engerman and Sokoloff (2005) describe: “vigorous political struggles were necessary

to do away with property or tax-based qualifications in the majority of the original thirteen states.”83

The existence of such tensions that reached an ultimate extent is clearly depicted in Engerman and

Sokoloff’s words: “the remarkably high rates of voter participation, especially by modern standards,

suggest that the bulk of the population was keen to exercise political influence. This evident

enthusiasm for voting seems likely to have contributed to how suffrage institutions evolved, as it

became ever more difficult for legislators or delegates to constitutional conventions to resist the

pressure to broaden access.”84 These laws did not just extend the suffrage (the US had the highest

proportion of the population voting in the world by the middle of the 19th century), but they adapted

that democracy.

- the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1944, the Swedish Nobel-laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal

described the conflict between the democratic ideals of the American creed and the reality of the daily

racial discriminations in his famous report “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern

Democracy.” As Myrdal (1944) observed: “The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart

of the American. It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle

goes on.”85 It was after World War I, namely under the war-stimulated revival of democracy, that the

white racism problem threatened to come alive as one of the most problematic contradictions of the

American society, but the clash on the social level became protest decades later and culminated in

the late Sixties. Hence, it would be wrong to say that this tension started in the years of the Supreme

Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed segregated education, or

the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Indeed, it already started a few decades after the Jim Crow laws (1890)

and before the African-American Civil Rights Movement. For example, even the Supreme Court’s

decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was based on the legal theory that Charles Hamilton

Houston developed in the late Twenties in order to fight against segregated education as the

concentrated expression of all the inequalities blacks endured. That nation’s racial divide became

protests which reached an ultimate extent with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy (1963) and

Martin Luther King Jr. (1968). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the civil rights legislation adopted

in the following years improved the democratic identity of the American democracy, because they

banned discriminations, ended racial segregation and unequal application of voter registration

requirements. In a few words, that change made the American democracy more inclusive.

Some hypotheses on the current crisis of democracy

Moving the research from the concepts to the analysis, some plausible hypotheses can be proposed,

but they still need to be rigorously tested before validity can be claimed for them. Even if the

theoretical explanation above described is an attempt to further develop Huntington’s (1968) theory

of institutionalization and the insights provided by the third approach, both this theoretical

83 Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World, The Journal of Economic

History, Volume 65, Issue 4, 2005, p. 15. 84 Ivi, p. 16. 85 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Harper & Brothers, 1944, Introduction.

18

explanation and the hypotheses listed below are derived from my own personal impressions.

According to Merkel (2013): “Crisis theories have their strength in discovering the major challenges

of democracy.”86 Hence, some hypotheses are described about the causes of the current crisis of

democracy. They are examples of the gradual patterns of development of new environmental

challenges that create growing tensions on democracies in the long term until a moment of ultimate

extent. They are not exhaustive, nor they are ranked, neither their impact can be considered as

homogenous between consolidated democracies.

Drawing on this comprehensive theoretical explanation, I propose some main hypotheses and their

impact on current democracies. I consider three tensions of outmost importance which have impacted

in terms of citizens’ disengagement; radicalization of politics; less responsiveness of policies and

deviation from traditional sources of legitimation. These three main hypotheses describe both patterns

of change in the environmental conditions of western democracies and their effects in terms of

growing tensions over them:

1. citizens’ disengagement: western societies were committed to collective loyalties (nation,

democracy, ideology, union, party, etc.) and material issues (welfare state, economic rights, active

policies against unemployment) until the last years of the Sixties. For example, political participation

was highly ideological and policy-making mainly aimed at developing the modern welfare state, and

addressing social problems in order to provide income maintenance, health care, housing. Both

collective loyalties and material issues made possible a condition of public engagement which lasted

since the Thirties. As Pierson (1995) observes “in all the advanced industrial democracies, the welfare

state was a central part of the post-war settlement that ushered in a quarter century of unprecedented

prosperity”87 and he adds “the political role of the welfare state has been equally significant. Promises

of social protection enhanced the legitimacy of Western democracies. Guarantees of social benefits

helped workers adapt to changing market conditions and encouraged wage restraint. More generally,

the expanded scope of government activity generated a range of linkages between state and society.”88

During the Seventies, the economic turmoil created the conditions for the emergence of a new

conservative political wave, whose main aim was to dismantle welfare state systems. In many

advanced industrial democracies, it was the beginning of a retrenchment of the welfare state, under

the conviction that social programs generated massive inefficiencies. The main process of gradual

disengagement started in the Seventies, when western political systems became more committed to

identity issues rather than material ones and to personal loyalties rather than collective loyalties. Both

identity issues and personal loyalties are not neutral and have divided these societies in Europe and

North America opening the way to controversial political debates and individualism. This happened

because new political issues created a clash of values and ethical judgments. On the one hand, as

Urbinati (2016) points out, in many European states “with the end of 1970s democracies faced the

growth of anti-generalist interests.”89 On the other hand, with reference to the American society,

Mansbridge (1990) notes the relevance of a reductionist attribution of human behaviour to self-

interest,90 while according to Bethke Elshtain (1993) a destructive obsession with rights has sapped

the mutual respect and understanding that are necessary for the good functioning of a democracy.91

Dalton (2004) reminds us there has been an extensive and long-term shift in public attitudes towards

86 Wolfgang Merkel, Is There a Crisis of Democracy?, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2013, p. 10.

87 Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment, Cambridge University Press, 1995,

p. 3. 88 Ivi, p. 4. 89 Nadia Urbinati, Reflections on the meaning of the crisis of democracy, in Mark Chou, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Democratic Theory,

Volume 3, 2016, p. 15. 90 Jane Mansbridge, Self-Interest in Political Life, Political Theory, Vol. 18, 1990. 91 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, House of Anansi Press Incorporated, 1993.

19

government, as a presumable consequence of common processes of social and political change.92 This

new phase of social life in the US has been studied also by Putnam (2000) in his “Bowling alone.”93

Putnam describes an alarming trend started since the 1960s or 1970s of withdrawal of Americans

from their communities.

The main effects of this long-term process of disengagement are ever more divided and conflicting

societies.

2. radicalization of politics or politics of the extremes: this second hypothesis is grounded on

Milanovic’s (2016) findings about the trade-off between globalization and democracy. On the one

hand, he analyses the winners and losers of globalization in terms of changes of cumulative growth

in real income (income adjusted for inflation and differences in price levels between the countries),

in the period that started with the fall of the Berlin Wall and finished with the outset of the global

financial crisis in 2008. On the other hand, he explains the decline of middle classes in western

democracies.

During these twenty years, that Milanovic terms the high globalization,94 real income did not grow

for most of the people of the rich economies of the OECD. In a few words the losers of globalization

are middle and lower middle classes in OECD countries.95 Milanovic stressed that: “about three-

quarters of the people in this group are citizens of the “old-rich” countries of Western Europe, North

America, Oceania (the three areas are sometimes represented by the acronym WENAO), and

Japan.”96 As he summarizes in a graphic representation, these percentage gains draw a reclining S

curve called elephant curve: “the great winners have been the Asian poor and middle classes; the

great losers, the lower middle classes of the rich world.”97 This trend is confirmed also if this effect

of globalization is analysed in terms of absolute gains.98 Milanovic’s research is crucial, because he

shows the decline of western middle classes: “The existence and function of the middle class is under

attack by rising inequality. The middle class in Western democracies is today both less numerous and

economically weaker vis-à-vis the rich than it was thirty years ago. In the United States, where the

change has been the most dramatic, the share of the middle class, defined as people with disposable

(after-tax) incomes around the median (more exactly, between 25 percent below and 25 percent above

the median), decreased from one-third of the population in 1979 to 27 percent in 2010.”99 Since their

democratization, this is the first time in which there is a contraction of the middle class in the western

societies.

These changes have been more radical in the United States, but they happened in many other

European countries. With reference to their political impact on democracy and its stability, Milanovic

follows Tocqueville when affirms that: “People in the middle class favoured democracy because they

had an interest in limiting the power of both the rich and the poor: to keep the rich from ruling over

them and the poor from confiscating their property.”100 Namely, this shift in economic power away

from the middle in favour of the top ones, made the former politically irrelevant.101

These findings are represented in the following figures from Milanovic’s recent book:

92 Russell J. Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices, The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial

Democracies Oxford University Press Inc., 2004, p. 22. 93 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, 2000. 94 Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Harvard University Press, 2016, p. 11. 95 Ivi, p. 20. 96 Ibidem. 97 Ibidem. 98 Ivi, p. 26. 99 Ivi, p. 194. 100 Ibidem. 101 Ivi, p. 198.

20

The elephant curve - Source: Milanovic (2016); Data source: Lakner and Milanovic (2015).102

The Global Incidence Curve - Source: Milanovic (2016); Data source: Lakner and Milanovic

(2015).

The chart shows the world’s population

along the horizontal axis, ranked from

the poorest to the richest percentile; real

income gains between 1988 and 2008

(adjusted for countries’ price levels) are

shown on the vertical axis.103

Milanovic’s reflections still leave open a number of important questions. For example, he offers a

possible explanation of the effect of the decline of the middle class, but this phenomenon can be

studied with reference to the radicalization of politics and the rise of populist movements. Indeed, if

we consider Milanovic’s finding, it follows that democracies are instable not just because of the

weaker role of the shrank middle-classes, but because of the stronger role of an ever extended part of

citizens that cannot be considered within middle-class, nor within the upper class. On the one hand,

this part of the society could reject moderate political parties and proposals, because their plans of

reforms imply changes in the long-term and more uncertain perspective of the future. On the other

hand, it could prefer to support the political extremes, which use a more charismatic than

programmatic strategy and promise great changes in the short-term. In this sense, they simply want

more in less time. The above mentioned change of political behavior can be explained if we

102 Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,

Oxford University Press, 2015. 103 Branko Milanovic, Why the Global 1% and the Asian Middle Class Have Gained the Most from Globalization, Harvard Busines

Review, 2016.

21

understand that this part of the population would like a change of their life in the short-term or simple

because this part of the population cannot wait a change that might happen only in the long-term. The

gradual transition from the middle-class to a poorer class can cause a structural movement of votes

from moderate to extremist parties and cause a growing radicalization of politics. In other words, it

can be the beginning of a new clear division of the electorate and the political parties, as a case of

“structural dealignment”104 toward the extreme parties in opposition to moderate political parties. In

Europe, this process might reshape party systems of western democracies into new frozen party

systems, or with Sartori’s words, new structurally consolidated or institutionalized ones.105

3. less responsiveness of policies and deviation from traditional sources of legitimation: globalization

of policies has substantially transformed functions, powers and roles of national governments and

policy-makers. Most of the researches on this issue are based on the common assumption of the

decline of state autonomy relative to other factors and actors. Scharpf (2000) claims that globalization

leads to a loss of political control and creates a dynamic whereby national governments are increasing

blamed for policy outcomes that are beyond their control.106 As Drezner (2007) phrases it:

“Globalization undercuts state sovereignty, weakening a government’s ability to effectively regulate

its domestic affairs.”107 At the same time, policies have been usually less responsive and the

legitimation of governments has been radically changed. Firstly, there has been a shift from national

to supranational decision-making processes. Indeed, policy-making processes are ever less national

institutional ones and ever more mixed or supranational ones. For example, the recent reforms of the

economic governance in the EU confer more powers to supranational institutions (i.e. European

Commission and European Court of Justice). Secondly, there has been a shift from political to

independent technical institutions for the control of many decision-making processes, their policies

and implementation. Finally, there is a third shift of power towards those states which are the primary

actors writing the rules that regulate global or international convergence processes. This suggests that

some states are privileged because they influence the formulation of rules and policies so as to avoid

of altering their preexisting ones and adjustment costs. This is particularly clear if we consider the

state of the European integration after the sovereign debt crisis. Today the European Commission and

new national independent fiscal authorities have more powers than before, while representative

political institutions have ever less powers. On the one hand, technical institutions can contribute to

the formulation of the budget, but they also exercise an ex-ante and ex-post control. On the other

hand, national laws have established new independent technical bodies which take part to the

decision-making process before the approval of the budget by national parliaments. Finally, with

reference to the third shift, under the current conditions, there is supremacy of some member states

over the others.

These processes of policy convergence happened since decades, not just concerning with fiscal

policies and not just because of the European integration. Similarly, policy convergence is the main

strategy of action for financial policies, budgetary policies, labor standards, environmental regulation,

taxation, antitrust issues, consumer health, trade policies, and more in general of all the so-called

regulatory issues. Drezner (2007) clarifies which their political effect is: “They matter in world

politics because of the way they affect the distribution of resources as well. Fundamentally, however,

international regulatory regimes strike a political chord because they symbolize a shift in the locus of

politics.”108 Other examples are related to the transnational governance made by new

nongovernmental organizations, the so-called epistemic communities and public policy networks.

According to Otto Holman: “transnational governance is about control and authority but – unlike

104 Romain Lachat, Measuring cleavage strength, University of Montreal, 2007, p. 4. 105 Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, A Framework for Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 37. 106 Fritz W. Scharpf, Interaktionsformen, Akteurzentrierter Institutionalismus in der Politikforschung, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für

Sozialwissenschaften, 2000. 107 Daniel W. Drezner, All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes, Princeton, New Jersey Woodstock:

Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 4. 108 Ivi, p. 5.

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‘government’ in democratic polities – not necessarily about legitimacy and democratic

accountability.”109 For example, this is the case of the OECD or the Washington Consensus. The first

was founded in 1961 in the form of a convergence club. The second was promoted by the most

powerful state players and subsequently transmitted to developing societies through the influential

international financial institutions.110 The Washington Consensus was followed in the Eighties by

many governments as the most appropriate model of economic and political strategy based on

neoliberal principles (i.e. deregulation, privatization and the liberalization of trade). Another example

is the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS).

This external constraint makes the political participation completely irrelevant because voters can

change leaders, governments and majorities in parliaments, nonetheless their votes cannot change

policies, because there is a pre-electoral decision of many policies that are adopted by democratic

governments. Urbinati notes that “the transformation of political decision making into an epistemic

process clashes with democracy quite dramatically.”111 Indeed, under these circumstances, citizens

did not contribute to the policies they are subject to. In a few words, it might be interesting to answer

to the question: which is the legitimacy of these policies?

If the policies are ever less responsive and the governments ever less representative of citizens, this

process of gradual transformation of national policy-making is changing the legitimacy of

governments, which seem to be legitimate because of the adoption of policies which are indicated

from outside their political system rather than from inside them. In a few words, voters are left aside.

Hence, today governments’ source of legitimation is not grounded on citizens’ votes in a democracy,

but on external actors, who indicate which goals to be achieved, how to achieve them and control on

policies. As Urbinati clearly explains: “there is someone else beside the citizens who is authorized to

decree what the substantive problems are and whether they are solved or not.”112 Going towards an

external top-down source of legitimation which does not require the participation of citizens rather

than an internal bottom-up legitimation which does require the participation of citizens. Today many

governments are endorsed by actors which are different from their electors. This is de-facto a different

source of legitimation which is alternative to the democratic one.

According to Schmitter (2015) “Parliaments have become less central to the decision- making

process, having been displaced by the concentration of executive power and a wider role for “guardian

institutions” dominated by (allegedly) independent technocrats. Governing cabinets include ever

more unelected members who are chosen for their “nonpartisan” status.”113 This transition to a

decision-making model based on closed independent groups can undermine the political role of

elected institutions by reducing national parliaments’ functions to represent, control and decide, into

a mere role of rubber stamp. In Urbinati’s words: “deliberative fora and committees of experts are

meant to rectify democracy by reducing the function of parliaments to a final yes-no vote.”114

Conclusion

As this study suggests, democracies and other regimes are in a context made by changing societies,

and the regimes which can endure, flourish and overcome crises are those ones which develop good

109 Otto Holman, in Patricia Kennett, Governance, globalization and public policy, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2008, p. 58. 110 Patricia Kennett, Governance, globalization and public policy, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2008, p. 8. 111 Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured Opinion, Truth, and the People, Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 97. 112 Nadia Urbinati, Reflections on the meaning of the crisis of democracy, in Mark Chou, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Democratic Theory,

Volume 3, 2016, p. 8. 113 Philippe C. Schmitter, “Crisis and transition, but not decline” in Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Democracy in decline?, Johns

Hopkins University Press and the National Endowment for Democracy, 2015, p. 41. 114 Ivi, p. 118.

23

capacities of adaptation. The current state of democratic and non-democratic regimes shows that:

most of the current authoritarian regimes are more adaptable today than before, while western

democracies are suffering for a lag in the process of adaptation. Indeed, today many authoritarian

regimes are able to overcome some of their crucial weaknesses that historically represented their

Achilles’ heel. For Example, as mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this paper, many authoritarian

regimes have consolidated procedures for the peaceful succession and replacement of one set of

leaders by another one. However, as Runciman’s (2013) research show, democracies have been more

adaptable than other regimes and they keep adapting to their circumstances.115

The current crisis of democracy will be overcome when western democracies will adapt themselves

to new contextual conditions. This interpretation of the conditions of many democratic regimes, as a

lag in the process of adaptation, offers important reflections with reference to the above mentioned

theoretical approaches. Some of these relevant theories describe how the crisis reveal itself, others

are focused on the origin of the crisis or on one particular crisis of democracy. Moreover, as clearly

explained by Merkel, most of them do not indicate a specific definition of democracy nor of crisis of

democracy. It is important to compare the idea I propose and the above mentioned theories, but it

would consume too much space to explain here. Therefore, it might be better to briefly refer to some

of them. For example, it seems that Tilly’s theory and concepts of democracy, democratization and

de-democratization are just focused on the idea of consultation and how its conditions are improved

in a phase of democratization or undermined in a phase of de-democratization. My idea of adaptability

of democracy open the way to a key of understanding which considers all its changes and not just

those ones related to the electoral dimension or procedures of consultation. In other words, in Tilly’s

approach democratization means ever more democracy, in the approach here proposed, adaptation

means ever better democracy for specific conditions of every time period. At the same time, the

interpretation of the current crisis of democracy, in terms of growing tensions and paralysis because

of a lag in the process of adaptation, differs from those ones of all the above mentioned authors. For

example, Merkel (2014) finds that indices of democracy do not indicate neither acute crisis nor in a

latent one in consolidated democracies, but at the same time, but finally, he adds “we are witnessing

some “subterranean” erosion of democracy not recognized by the demos.”116

Every crisis of democracy and phase of adaptation has a strong impact which goes far beyond the

institutional, political or social dimension, and has relevant theoretical implications. Indeed, periods

of crisis and adaptation change not just the state of democracy and the existing democratic systems,

but they change the democracy as idea. Every democracy, even those ones that are considered as the

best democracies, are imperfect regimes in a never-ending process of adaptation.

Accordingly, it might be important to stress that those regimes which can endure and preserve their

political identity are those ones which are more adaptable. If it would be possible to update

Huntington’s (1968) famous claim: “the most important political distinction among countries

concerns not their form of government but their degree of government,”117 today it would be focused

on identity and adaptability of a regime. Hence, it would say: the most important political distinction

among countries concerns not their identity but their adaptability. That is to say, the capacity of every

regime to change in order to protect its identity.

Matteo Laruffa

115 David Runciman, The Confidence trap a history of democracy in crisis from World War I to the present, Princeton University

Press, 2013, p. 58. 116 Wolfgang Merkel, Is There a Crisis of Democracy?, Democratic Theory Volume 1, Issue 2, Winter 2014, p. 23. 117 Huntington Samuel, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968, p. 1.

24

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